


All the King’s Warships and All the King’s Men

by alunsina



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:05:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3286307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alunsina/pseuds/alunsina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Baekhyun is a warship whisperer and Yixing is his military detail. There’s a problem about boners but it’s not actually as funny as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the King’s Warships and All the King’s Men

Well, Baekhyun’s pretty much fucked. 

 

*

 

Popping a boner in a middle of a life-and-death situation was a perfectly normal stress reaction. There was a paper, or five, back in the archives of the state academy. If the ship could manage a stable connection back to Earth for more than a few minutes at a time—which might be possible if Chanyeol stopped playing his video games in the ship computers—Baekhyun could pull up the appropriate data. Rustle up a presentation or something. Just give him five minutes of not-asphyxiating inside a cramped air duct, preferably without a well-muscled thigh pressing in between his legs. 

If five minutes was too much to ask for Baekhyun could just say: hyung, it’s not you, okay, no really, it’s me and my body’s stupid panic response—wanting to get it on with anyone within five feet before dying horribly in the air duct of an ancient warship.

God, he couldn’t say that with a straight face. He’d rather die.

 

*

 

Fun fact: apparently, Baekhyun was almost as much into thighs as he was into boobs.

Fun fact number two: they didn’t die, thank god, they didn’t die, but how he wished he did back there, just for five minutes. Then he could’ve killed enough brain cells to forget the whole thing ever happened.

 

*

 

Baekhyun stopped mid-chew. There were cucumbers in his sandwich. Normally he would know when someone was trying to poison him by mere sight and smell of his food. Or, whenever Chanyeol was kind enough to bring him lunch straight from the ship’s mess hall with eyes comically wide, grin on the verge of splitting his head into two. Baekhyun would then remember pissing on Kyungsoo’s metaphorical cornflakes that morning and that Chanyeol, if anything, was Kyungsoo’s obedient emissary of death.

Unfortunately he crammed half the sandwich into his mouth without looking or smelling it, still staring at the readings on his tablet and far too busy to pay attention to anything else, and felt the atrocious thing against the roof of his mouth.

"—found a sighting near the Cassiopeian cluster a week ago, but the arrival of the trading ships spooked it and it soon made a hyperspace jump after. Any attempts of communicating with it so far has been ignored."

It could be onion, Baekhyun thought not-hysterically. It could be. Though he made the sandwich himself before reporting to work that morning and didn’t remember putting any onions or cucumbers in it. If only Lee Soo Man wouldn’t see it as bad form to spit out half-masticated bread in the middle of their weekly meetings. He was only a hologram projection bobbing over Joonmyun’s shoulder and didn’t attend the meetings himself, yes, but his displeasure could be immediately felt in pay cuts and demotions. Baekhyun didn’t want to be downgraded to maintenance. The entire ship would be a bitch to clean.

"Any casualties?" Joonmyun said. Obviously he was asking Jongdae, a shining example of why nice guys didn’t always get the warship. But Joonmyun was glaring at Baekhyun like Baekhyun let out gas. (It happened one time and it was a joke. Lee Soo Man probably couldn’t even tell the difference between Joonmyun’s crumpled face post-budget hearing and post-someone-farted-in-the-conference-room).

Jongdae shook his head. "It didn't attack any of the trading ships and there was no inhabited planet nearby." He was looking at Baekhyun now too, eyebrows raised, curious. Baekhyun could live with curiosity.

“What is it, Baekhyun? Do you have something to say?” Joonmyun said.

Chew or swallow? Perhaps he should wait until the end of the meeting to upchuck the whole onion-thing in the trash bin where no one—not Lee Soo Man’s projection, not Joonmyun or Jongdae or Minseok or Chanyeol, not Kyungsoo and his white-rich eyes—could see him?

“Mmphfff.” Baekhyun said. 

“Okay.” Joonmyun turned to Chanyeol. “Please give us something to work with here.” Chanyeol glanced at his own tablet and probably saw the same depressing readings Baekhyun’s got on his. 

“We are too slow to catch up with the rogue warship,” Chanyeol began and afraid that he had hurt their own ship’s feelings he patted one of its columns gently, whispering ‘there, there’ though the ship didn’t have a brain any longer and had no more feelings to speak of. “We shouldn’t follow BB blindly. Expending more fuel for making longer jumps increases our chances we will be depleted before coming to a refueling station and we might get stranded one way or another.”

“BB?” Kyungsoo croaked around his kimbap. Was it possible Kyungsoo shoved some leftover cucumbers into Baekhyun’s sandwich like the vindictive person he was while Baekhyun’s all distracted?

Chanyeol shrugged. “Black Beauty. The warship is black and it’s—“

“A beauty. Got it. Lieutenant, got any suggestions?” Joonmyun said.

They all dutifully looked down their tablets to appear distracted and unfocused. Baekhyun could hear Minseok fiddling with the sleeves of his army fatigues, thinking things over, before saying “Use a personal cruiser. We could send a small team after the warship, stealth-mission style. Less likely they’d scare it away.”

“How many in the team?”

“Three would be fine. A whisperer. Two from the military,” Minseok said. Chanyeol wasn’t even discreet in tapping excitedly on his tablet, perhaps already selecting which cruiser to load up with supplies as per Minseok’s suggestion. “Let them engage and calm down the warship first. Then we make the hyperspace jump and come close enough to board it.”

“We could work with that.” Joonmyun was biting down on the corner of his lip, excited but working hard not to show it. Sometimes people like Minseok were like those small fierce solo fighters in the old war that were quiet and unassuming and then you pay attention to them and startle them into a response and they have these huge anti-matter beams that blast you into bits—

“Baekhyun, you really don’t have anything to say in this meeting?” Joonmyun asked again.

Baekhyun had lots of things to say, mainly, _who the hell fucked up his sandwich_ but that involved swallowing and opening his mouth. He shook his head in a negative.

“I’m volunteering Yixing and Zitao. They are a good team,” Minseok said, emboldened by Joonmyun’s underwhelming response. Why couldn’t it be Sehun and Jongin? Or Sehun, Tao, and Jongin? Maybe any permutation of the three? Baekhyun was already hunching back into his seat like he could disappear if he wished hard enough.

“Are you sure about Zitao?” 

Minseok nodded. “He’s a little excitable but there’s Yixing to keep him in line if needed.” 

“Jongdae, are you up for this?”

“That warship doesn’t respond to me, hyung. At all. But I could try again if you really want to,” Jongdae said, frowning. Joonmyun ‘hmmed’ while the holographic Lee Soo Man rubbed his chin in thought.

It felt like Baekhyun’s academy classes all over again, trying to be as motionless as possible so the professor would pass him over for recitation. Kyungsoo was on his right. Kyungsoo could handle anything; give him a psychotic ship-brain and he could out-psycho it back. At least Kyungsoo would not end up having embarrassing boners towards his colleagues inside claustrophobic air ducts. Yep.

 

*

 

On the day Baekhyun turned nine he went to the kitchens and watched his grandmother bake a cake for his birthday, three-tiered, with marshmallow frosting. He sang her a song and kept her company. His grandmother smiled and let him lick the spoon that had been used to scoop the frosting, and Baekhyun sang even louder and their whole ancestral home sang along with him. The little sentient mixers and the little AI-controlled spatulas, their oven and their fridge and their dishwashers and their spoons and forks, danced in time to his voice.

“Oh,” his grandmother breathed both in surprise and wonder and, “Oh. That was a waste of a perfectly good sponge,” she said, after all the kitchen implements have done their jig and the cake lost a tier or two. That was when they found out that: Baekhyun could carry a tune, house-brains understood and followed his voice on an instinctual level, and he had the ability to ruin perfectly good cakes. The end.

 

*

 

A story:

When Baekhyun had his first trip out of the Milky Way Galaxy (out of Earth even) it took him a lot longer than the prescribed hour to get his space-legs so to speak. By then his transport had crawled past Mars and Baekhyun watched the vision of Earth growing smaller and smaller in the HUD until it was but a pinprick in the distance. Then nothing, _nothing_ as Earth was swallowed by the darkness of space and he was nothing and he was cold and it felt like he was floating in space too. What was gravity in this metal claptrap of a cruiser anyway but an artificial creation? He belatedly wished he’d taken their pilot’s suggestion of sleeping through the whole trip. Jongdae, the other new recruit, had been snoring his way out of the solar system in one of the bunk beds at the back. 

“People said talking to ancient artifacts is boring. I expected it to be boring. Signing up to be an exo-archaeologist working for the state should be safe and boring right?” Baekhyun resisted the urge to bite his nails clean through then proceeded to run his mouth instead. He was going to get shot. “Right. Just didn’t expect the black guard outside my dorm room. Well, they say there’s a first time for everything including getting kidnapped to my first job assignment. Do you suppose they’ll let me talk to 200-year-old sentient space heaters, as like, a beginner’s course before moving on to bigger things?”

“Slow down. Take a deep breath,” one of their military escorts helpfully supplied, rubbing Baekhyun’s back and massaging his shoulders. “You’re having a panic attack.” Because his hyperventilating for the past five minutes hadn’t been obvious enough, thanks.

“Who wouldn’t panic anyway when you’re all-“ Baekhyun gestured at, well, the soldier’s everything: full battle dress uniform, a strap of some heavy firearm hanging from his shoulders, belt clip with ammunition and handguns and stun guns tucked at the hip. The guy had two thigh holsters loaded with knives and more guns, for fuck’s sake, like Baekhyun’s a dangerous war criminal and not a pasty-faced new grad from the state academy. “I’ve seen less armed people take on a whole ship.”

“That’s on tv, I think.” Sergeant, it said on his uniform. Sergeant Zhang. It sounded like the name of an imperial warlord of some bygone era his professor prattled about in their Warriors and Warfare modules. He had sleepy eyes. A wayward dimple on his cheek. _I’m going to trust that dimple_ , Baekhyun thought, _and hope he isn’t a trigger-happy meathead_.

If Sergeant Zhang Yixing, Yixing hyung, was a trigger-happy meathead he didn’t show it. He pulled Baekhyun through a hidden enclosure where their makeshift kitchen and their pantry was located. Yixing sat him down next to the table and poured him a cup of hot tea with the calm and poise of a tea ceremony master. Baekhyun gratefully wrapped his cold hands around the cup, tried not to think about the weird calluses on Yixing’s fingers (from holding a gun, from holding a knife, no, not thinking about it). How gently they gripped and tugged on Baekhyun’s arm. 

“What songs do space heaters listen to nowadays?” Yixing took the chair across Baekhyun’s.

 

His voice cracked on the second verse because he was nervous (of course, what else was new). He rarely sang to actual breathing humans these days. Artificial intelligences were better audiences. They were less critical of his stability and breathing technique and only cared about what he had to say:

_you, radiating warmth!_  
 _coils like curly hair_  
 _glowing red and glowing redder_  
 _my wallet is weeping_

“What.” Yixing was wheezing, which on the surface was Not Good since Baekhyun didn’t want to be mistaken as a dangerous criminal who put armed sergeants to death-by-breathlessness. “What is that? Are you serious?” His dimple seemed to be alive, growing deep in the guy’s cheek, and he was bent over and hitting his thighs in laughter.

Baekhyun let out a breath. Someone with a sense of humor. He shrugged, the tension slipping off of his shoulders. 

“The words are not important. You just have to hit the right notes in the right order.” His hands motioned to some imaginary octaves in the air. It was a simplistic explanation for something he had been trained at the academy for years. “The order of the notes is a language that the AI’s understand. I just make up the words. It’s more entertaining that way.”

“What do the notes actually say?” Yixing asked, looking adorably confused. Baekhyun wanted to reach out, smooth over the scrunch of his forehead with a thumb, but then remembered the guy was a walking armory, deadly despite his dimpled smile. Could probably stab his hand if it’s violating some military rule. He sipped from his cup of cooling tea instead. 

“Program codes. Technical stuff.” Baekhyun said. In actuality if the notes had been written down and transcribed it would look like: _oh god what am I getting into, oh god I’m in fucking space, and, the only person that could possibly understand what I’m going through is-_

Jongdae snored on in the back.

“You are a very good singer.” Yixing said. 

_You are a very kind person_ , Baekhyun thought. “Thanks. Do you want to hear the songs I have for toasters?”

 

*

 

The very second the meeting was over Baekhyun stalked to the nearest washroom, slammed the door behind him, and upchucked the awful awful mouthful of bread and cucumber into the toilet bowl.

The one time, the one time he managed to behave himself and keep quiet on a meeting and they gang up on him. He gargled and spat in the washroom sink for the nth time, frankly convinced the cucumbers were part of an intricate plan for revenge. So what if he mistakenly used Kyungsoo’s toothbrush some mornings? In his defense it was before his morning coffee. 

He bumped into someone tall and military-related in the hallway and Baekhyun relaxed when it was just Tao.

“You.”

Tao raised his eyebrows. “Yes, me.”

“I don’t see you doing the salute.” Baekhyun adopted a disappointed look. “No respect from military brats these days.”

Tao’s jaw dropped in surprise. “Hyung! You’re a civilian contractor, do I really have to? “

“Such rudeness. I can’t believe I am being ignored so soon after a promotion.“ Baekhyun shook his head and Tao grudgingly complied with a proper salute. 

“There, now I feel so much better.” He reached out as if to straighten Tao’s collar, but really it was to mess up the new pin on Tao’s shoulder. Tao heaved a defeated sigh and brushed Baekhyun’s hands away. 

“If you’re trying to scare me away from doing the mission, hyung, it’s not working.”

Tao must’ve already gotten his assignment. “Huh, they work fast. If I wanted to scare you I’d tell you about that mosquito sitting on your neck.” Since Baekhyun was that kind of terrible he laughed at the frozen expression on Tao’s face. He would have applauded Chanyeol for the speedy updates and his general competency in these things. But the bastard also goaded the rest of the staff to vote for Baekhyun on this mission. So.

Tao snapped into attention. “Sir!” He called over Baekhyun’s shoulder and Baekhyun’s gut somersaulted like a loose-limbed acrobat.

Without turning his head, he said, “Please tell me it’s Minseok hyung you’re saluting to.”

“No, actually it’s Yi—“

 

*

 

Sergeant Zhang Yixing hummed and bopped to a happy tune that was unfamiliar to Baekhyun. A feat given that the guy was also busy shooting down random machinery rising up to murder them. Baekhyun was nothing but a collector of songs he could dismantle and put together in technical code, and this would have been of great interest to him but this was not the time, hyung, no, go away and sing it someplace else, please.

Some pipe exploded in the back of the transport carrier they were trying to tame. Okay, he went off key there. Baekhyun tried to swallow past the lump in his throat, readjusted the hardware at the back of his neck (some loose wire probably messed up the translation of his notes). Tried singing that phrase again.

“Relax. They’ll understand if you mess up a bit on your first.” There was Yixing’s hand squeezing his shoulder. Baekhyun almost missed it with all the information the transport carrier AI was spewing in his head— _okay the little bastard just locked us up in the bridge, fuck, so that was the oxygen supply he blew up, great, just great_.

There will come a day where Baekhyun would have fucked things up so royally Yixing would regret every bit of his unwarranted faith in a rookie’s abilities. Not today, Baekhyun thought as he could hear the telltale crank, hiss and beep of the transport carrier walls around him. Not today, as the lights flickered overhead then completely went out, leaving them in darkness, the AI gone quiet in Baekhyun’s mind. 

“I told you, it was going to be fine.” A shoulder pat and then Yixing contacted Joonmyun, Minseok and Chanyeol. Baekhyun slumped against the captain's seat in relief, wincing when he pulled out the wires from his neck.

 

*

 

When Baekhyun was an undergrad student a sentient appliance from their Processing Ancient Artifacts seminar fell in love with him. It was simultaneously hilarious and endearingly cute how the espresso machine would blink its lights at Baekhyun, like a flirty wink, at every opportunity. His professors explained it was something about Baekhyun's tone hitting the sweet spot in the electrical pathways of a 30th century espresso machine (of all things) and it wasn't as rare an occurrence these days. But by god, did it give him the most delicious cups of coffee ever—wonderfully thick espresso shots with a nice layer of crema and just the right touch of bitterness. He had been running around the campus shaking and over-caffeinated all week until the local coffee police (i.e., coffee shops) became both alarmed and curious at the particular espresso machine’s methods and attempted a closer study. 

Then the espresso machine fell tragically in love with a manual coffeepot in one of the cafeterias and never made coffee again. The end.

 

*

 

Focus was always something of a problem for Baekhyun. Over breakfast in the mess hall, Baekhyun came to ask Kyungsoo’s trade secret whenever he was plugged into a ship-brain:

“Sex works.” Kyungsoo said. Baekhyun spat most of his coffee on his plate of pancakes.

“You did that on purpose!”

“Maybe.” Kyungsoo made a faintly disgusted face at Baekhyun’s plate. “And I regret it.”

Baekhyun didn’t have the time to have a safe test run of Kyungsoo’s so-called methods in the field. Because one moment he was singing a jaunty melody he had designed to bypass the warship’s security and then the next he was knee-deep in some stomach churning imagery about the old war, the AI bombarding him with all the terrible things it did a century or two ago. And _oh_ this was why they had all those Psych units in the academy. He tried to block it with the mindfulness exercises they taught him—yes, pay attention to his own breathing, count the number of deep breaths, let the image of a burning planet drift away slowly in the river of his mind—but fuck it, nothing worked. So sex. Baekhyun thought a lot about sex. 

(And somewhere along the way instead of thinking about the last porn he had watched or the sweet girl he last slept with, his mind became hyper-focused on the little things: the stretch of army fatigues across someone’s ass, that someone bending over and fitting the gun holster tight across the strong muscles of his thighs.) 

 

*

 

Another story:

On the 3rd year of the king’s reign, exactly 100 years after the Great War and the first batch of sentient warships had been decommissioned, Baekhyun would be gainfully employed as an exo-archaeologist specializing in the study and retrieval of rogue warships, transport carriers, and other remnants of the old war. Some of his days would be spent strapping himself in abandoned bridges of warships, trying to sing-talk AIs into disabling any working weapon systems and surrendering themselves, and hoping he wouldn’t ever get burned out.

Baekhyun would begin the 63rd day of his employment groping his way to consciousness and out of his bed, feeling like something died in his throat (probably his voice, probably a small alien animal). He would stumble on his way towards the shower, make a distracted effort to ensure he was using his own toiletries this time and not his roommate’s, and stumble out. Dress up. Drag his whole body out of his shared quarters and into the hallways.

Then there would be breakfast. He would almost burn his throat trying to get caffeine into his system while Jongdae brightly pointed at the mistakes in Baekhyun’s debugging codes. There would be talk about range, an argument about how Baekhyun didn’t have one as wide as Jongdae’s, yes, but the ships liked his voice so much better…

Paperwork to deal with and working lunch and dodging Kyungsoo’s attempts to kill him for using his soap, or shampoo, or toothbrush, no, no, it was an honest mistake. Chanyeol would laugh until someone pings him that one or ten things had gone terribly wrong with their ship or they were going backwards again and really Chanyeol might as well marry the ship’s bridge.

And then a headache right on cue in the middle of reading and writing reports. Baekhyun would drag his work out of his desk, find some place more motivating. Ship’s shooting range. What better way to motivate yourself than to have a constant reminder of imminent death despite all the paperwork between missions? There was something calming about watching Yixing eviscerate his paper targets from a distance, like everything was alright in the world, and Baekhyun would settle on the floor behind the bulletproof glass panes, earplugs and additional ear protection weighing his head, laptop balanced on his thighs. A passing Jongin would make a passing comment about being someone’s shadow and Baekhyun would make a _huh?_ face, taking one of the earplugs out, not understand and let it pass. He would start singing under his breath.

“You’ve worked hard.” Baekhyun would look up and say at the familiar silhouette against the walls, the sudden silence on the shooting range a good enough cue that Yixing was done. Yixing had always worked hard, every second and every minute of his post here on the ship, and Baekhyun envied and admired him for it. 

“You’ve worked hard too. Busy?” A clang of locker doors and Yixing stowing away ammo and Baekhyun getting to his feet and packing up his laptop. 

“Always. I should be grateful about never running out of work, I guess. But still, it’s one of two of the great mysteries in the universe: when are we going to catch them all?”

Yixing, chuckling. “The other great mystery?”

You’re the unlikeliest person to become a soldier on this side of the galaxy. You could’ve been working somewhere else. “Why do you insist on using old guns? That’s a little stupid. It’s a suicide waiting to happen when we’re above-planet and the gravity fluctuates.”

Yixing would shake his head and pat him on the backside. “You’re lucky I like you and I enjoy your singing.”

Something in Baekhyun would catch and turn and tumble and break and be put whole again. He would not understand.

“Ah. My bad. Are we good to go then? They’ll be serving hotpot at the mess for dinner today.” Baekhyun would ask.

Yixing, his duffle bag in hand. “Yes, we’re good.”

 

*

 

They talked like proper adults after the mission debriefing, after everyone else had left the conference room. Some genius jammed the doors before Baekhyun could get to it and he failed to run away at the first sign of danger.

“About what happened in the air ducts.“ Yixing began, looking over the line of Baekhyun’s shoulder, not meeting his eyes. He had this sort of twisted calmness that Baekhyun definitely was not feeling at the moment. Nope, not an ominous way to start a conversation at all.

“Oh god. Can we skip this?” Baekhyun willed himself to disappear but teleportation still had kinks to work out in his lifetime and required forms to be done in triplicate. 

“This is also a kind of debriefing.” Yixing said, sounding defensive. 

“There is a pun in there I am not going to make because I still have some shame despite what happened on that ship.” 

“I just don’t understand, Baekhyun-ah.”

Baekhyun rubbed at his face, thinking of ways he could put Yixing off, throw him off the scent. “I thought we were going to die in there before I reached the ship-brain. You had your thigh at my crotch while you whispered in my ear and hey, who knew that was like a thing for me now? My dick probably decided on having one last good time.” He peeked through his fingers. Yixing was frowning at him. 

“Since when?”

Torn between keeping his eyes closed or looking at Yixing’s face again, Baekhyun inspected the tops of his shoes instead. Since when? Since when did he have a raging boner for thighs? If he blinked, right there behind his eyelids was the sense-memory of Yixing’s reaction at certainly-not-Baekhyun’s-gun poking him in the hip. Some puzzlement, then a lot like shuttering parts of himself as it was clearly not a priority to deal with when a warship AI was trying to kill them in the most horrible of ways. 

“I don’t know, hyung. I’m sorry.”

“Has the ship AI compromised you in anyway? What about from your last mission? The psych evals were clear.“

“I don’t know, hyung.”

Pause. He could hear Yixing trying to work it out. Baekhyun couldn’t deal with this, not when they almost died just a few hours ago. 

“Please, hyung. Let me rest.” He didn’t even have to fake the hoarseness in his voice. At least Yixing got it straight away, mumbling apologies for keeping him and something else that passed clean through Baekhyun’s ears. The doors slid open for Yixing readily enough to Baekhyun’s irritation and then Baekhyun was alone, as alone as one could ever be in a ship as bugged and watched as this one.

Baekhyun lifted his head, glared at one point in the ceiling. “Chanyeol, if you do this again I will end you and delete all your high scores in the ship computers.” He didn’t have to tug on the doors for them to let him out of the room for once, though they did give out a steady whine of complaint. 

 

*

 

Like his grandmother would say: what a waste, what a goddamn waste of a perfectly good cake. The end.

 

*

 

The thing with having friends in the up and up, or just having a Chanyeol let’s be honest here, was the total ease in which you could avoid someone for a week, two weeks, a month. (Until that same friend betrayed you and you hunted them down in the ship bridge and deleted their tetris high scores and even then their tears were not satisfying, no, so you undeleted everything because you felt bad and because Kyungsoo would stab you in your sleep. And you hugged it out and Chanyeol tried to dick punch you and Jongdae shouted about how embarrassing the two of you were. End of heartwarming story about friendship.)

 

*

 

An actual heartwarming story:

During Baekhyun’s first birthday aboard the ship they surprised him with cake in the mess hall, which was awesome. But more importantly:

1.) Everyone was drunk.  
2.) At least, everyone not on duty was drunk (which left Chanyeol frowning into his cold can of cider while he watched Kyungsoo smile stupidly at everyone, including the potted plants).  
3.) Joonmyun, respected leader of exo-archaeologists, danced some new-age version of macarena.  
4.) Someone spiked Yixing’s juice.  
5.) There was a number five but Baekhyun was too drunk to remember.

A drunk Yixing was not marginally different from Yixing high on sugar, or Yixing high on green tea, which meant he spaced out a lot and laughed at Baekhyun’s unfunny jokes. Although, yes, he was bit more affectionate—he kissed Baekhyun on the cheek, as well as Kyungsoo, Tao, and Minseok, even Chanyeol who was sulking in the corner being sober. 

“Why so glum on your birthday, Baekhyun?” Yixing said, holding him in a one-armed hug.

“My glass is empty,” Baekhyun complained and got promptly refilled by a passing Sehun. Even with a full glass of alcohol in hand it still did nothing to boost his spirits right away.

Mistaking Baekhyun’s mood as something existential in nature, Yixing said, “Hey, hyung would always be here to protect you.”

“I know, I know.”

“You’ll catch them all.”

“Of course.” Baekhyun was a crier when drunk. How embarrassing. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. 

“Hyung wishes-“ Yixing scrunched his eyebrows, searching for the words. “I wish you-“

“-a happy birthday?” Baekhyun sniffed. He reached out a free hand, ironing out the wrinkles on Yixing’s forehead with his thumb like he always wanted to. Yixing caught his hand after.

“I wish you would be happy.” No time to catalog the expression on Yixing’s face because he was already leaning in, kissing Baekhyun’s other cheek. 

 

*

 

There was no way around it. Baekhyun knew he'd have to face Yixing again one time or another, preferably with exits on both sides of the room and definitely nowhere near cramped spaces (i.e., air ducts). It would also be great if it was sometime before being stuck in a personal cruiser with him during their mission (ETA 72 hours and 36 minutes). Granted he didn't want their meeting to happen now (hallway, two witnesses) but Chanyeol didn’t have a chance to give him a heads up.

So:

“Hyung.” He straightened up beside Tao and knew immediately that his posture was crap. Baekhyun would make a terrible soldier.

Sehun was trailing behind Yixing like an awkward praying mantis, then he bumped into Yixing's back who had stopped and stared at Baekhyun.

“Have you been well?” Baekhyun hid a wince. That was something he would ask his parents when he didn’t know what to say to them.

Yixing nodded slowly like Baekhyun’s question needed special consideration. “Still busy?”

“Uh, yeah. Tracking down warships, reports, more reports. You know.” He shrugged. “Stuff.”

“Singing?”

“Outside of work, not really. I’m a bit out of practice.” Baekhyun admitted. The last time he was sent by Joonmyun was to corral a bunch of sentient cargo ships that had been used to ferry survivors during the war. It was slightly less traumatizing than dealing with warships of genocidal tendencies. “Last mission was two weeks ago.”

“I see.” Yixing licked his lips. God. “Who did they assign to you?”

“Huh?” Baekhyun asked. Tao made a noise behind Baekhyun, which he ignored because- Focus. He needed focus. 

“Oh, it was Tao. He was okay.” Mostly. Aside from that humiliating episode where they thought the second cargo ship was haunted and there was an endless game of chicken before they decided, fuck it, and ran in with their eyes half-closed, screaming the whole way.

“Good. I guess-“ Yixing frowned, like words were becoming a big problem for him. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah, will see each other on-“

Yixing nodded again and quickly made his exit. 

 

*

 

Baekhyun wanted to collapse on the floor for the duration of his day.

“That was not awkward at all.” Sehun piped in, patting Baekhyun’s shoulder. 

Tao looked thoughtful. “Hyung is acting weird.”

Baekhyun shoved both his hands into his pockets, unable to keep the mulish expression from taking over his face as he stalked away from the two. “Well, I’m sorry. Your hyung is pretty tired right now after all those meetings. Is Chanyeol still at the bridge? I just remembered I have an appointment to kill him.”

“He’s there.” Sehun said behind Baekhyun.

Tao was catching up to him with his long strides. “No, no! I meant Yixing hyung was acting strange. He knew I was assigned to protect you two weeks ago.”

Baekhyun stopped and faced Tao again. “Really?”

“He gave me a list to memorize. Who knew you were so finicky?”

 

*

 

Tao showed him The List. It was three pages long. Yixing might as well title the whole document, The Care and Feeding of Byun Baekhyun, Warship Whisperer Extraordinaire.

 

*

 

 _Travel broadens the mind_ , Baekhyun’s professor had inscribed in all caps in his yearbook on the day of his graduation. Knowing the grimy old jerk he most likely implanted the idea that Baekhyun should sign up to be an exo-archaeologist just so they could never be on the same planet again. But when one was stuck waiting in a cruiser hurtling through hyperspace, going after a possibly psychotic warship AI by the name of a horse, one tended to gain a little bit of perspective.

Baekhyun would maybe like to thank his professor for that.

 

*

 

He woke up from a nap under a warm and cozy layer of flannel ( _24\. He’ll insist on not needing sleep but he might fall asleep. Remember blankets. Baekhyun easily gets cold._ ), face smushed into the drool-covered pillow of the small bunk bed at the back of the cruiser. There was a glass of water and a plate of tuna sandwich beside him ( _4\. No cucumbers please_ and _11\. He forgets to eat whenever he's nervous for a mission…_ ) and Baekhyun wondered how many times he had small kindnesses like these go under his radar because he was too caught up with himself, too scared, too stupid. He stretched out, picked up his sandwich, and bit into it ( _15\. No cucumbers. I mean it. Although he gets real funny about it sometimes._ ), walked in the direction of the pilot's chair where Tao was maybe panicking at the cruiser's controls while Yixing was trying his hardest to actually fly the thing. Thank god they had auto-pilot on.

 

*

 

In the HUD, Black Beauty loomed like a dark, stormy, all-encompassing cloud.

 

*

 

The most anticlimactic story in the history of space adventure:

Baekhyun made the opening salvo when they came within hailing distance, sending a patchwork of song-codes like a 'hello' or a musical handshake of a sort. When the black warship didn't aim laser beams at them, just sent a short beep confirming it received their messages, it was pretty safe to say they could make the approach without being blown to bits.

But when they docked inside the warship’s hangar and didn’t die, and walked from hangar to the hallways, hallways to the other end of the warship and continued to not die, Baekhyun came down to three possibilities: a.) either they were drugged or dying on the floor as of this moment and this was all a hallucination, b.) they were in a collective dream and this was all a hallucination, and c.) aliens! (and also, still trapped in a hallucination, goddamn it.).

“Pinch me,” Baekhyun said and was promptly kicked in the shins by Tao. “Oww. Thanks.” So it was letter C then. God. _Aliens._

“No problem.”

When they came nearer to the ship’s bridge without the automatic doors even making an attempt to shave off their faces, Yixing volunteered to scout ahead for any impending death ( _52\. Baekhyun hates surprises, especially ones that cause a lot of pain_ ) and came back with a wondrous expression on his face.

"All clear," Yixing said in his best soldierese and Baekhyun's heart quivered (hallucination, goddamn it).

So of course when they entered the ship bridge, reassured of their safety, every control panel and computer screen lit up and swamped their visions in pure white. Baekhyun's eyes burned and _he couldn't see_ and damn the laser beams were inside the ship and they were all going to die after all.

"Hyung, open your eyes. You need to see this." Tao said.

The control panel lights blinked at all three of them, alternating and changing into red and green and blue, just like winking fairy lights.

Yixing moved further ahead of them. "Are we in danger? Baekhyun, what does it say?"

"Uh," Baekhyun said.

Tao fidgeted. "It's sort of pretty. Would Joonmyun hyung mind if I took pictures of it?"

"Uh. No," Baekhyun said and thought of the last time he had a perfect cup of coffee.

 

*

 

He didn't remember thinking too much about it, just that he'd come to a decision sometime in between taking the first bite of his tuna sandwich and seeing the dark elephantine glory of the warship in their HUDs: life was too short and Yixing continued to be hot, and if the universe deemed them fit to survive another day he would tell him. 

Because it shouldn't matter if Yixing felt the same or not.

Because it shouldn't matter if Baekhyun would make things more or less awkward between them.

Because Yixing was a guy who invested himself in other people's happiness and he deserved to know that someone was deeply invested in his. 

Because Baekhyun’s concerned about someone else’s happiness for a change.

 

*

 

Maybe this wasn’t the ideal situation in Baekhyun’s mind. Maybe he wrote the tiny speeches in his head expecting to die horribly thirty seconds after he said them. Now strapped into the captain’s chair, singing what might as well be a trot song to disable what seemed to be a non-existent laser cannon and making sure Tao didn’t trip up security while he gallivanted around and took selcas, the only real danger was Baekhyun accidentally agreeing to one of the warship’s marriage proposals.

“Is that even possible?” Yixing mused, checking the rest of the bridge while they waited for their own ship to come through this side of the galaxy.

“What? Marrying a ship?” Baekhyun said in singsong, feeling the pleased hum of the warship around him, feeling just a tiny bit brave. “Anything’s possible. I’ve been helplessly in love with you for a while now though so I don’t see myself agreeing. Even for kicks.”

“Hmm, I would imagine it would be hard. A different sort of commitment. Marrying a ship.” Yixing said. 

Well, that was easy. 

(On their way back to their cruiser Yixing tripped by the entrance and Baekhyun reached out a steadying hand on Yixing’s elbow. Saw Yixing turn an alarming shade of red.

“This is so strange, Baekhyun-ah,” Yixing said but didn’t pull away.

“It is. But I’m not taking it back,” Baekhyun said.)

 

*

 

On Baekhyun’s 1,023rd day of employment he would grope his way into consciousness and out of bed, thinking that something crawled in his throat and died there (probably Tao’s furry animal, probably Jongin’s other furry animal). He would stumble on his way to the shower—

and knock his head on a magically-appearing shelf instead.

“Shower’s the other way.” The mop of black hair would mumble out of the tangled heap of comforters and blankets.

Baekhyun would squint at the shelf in suspicion. “Since when?”

“Since I don’t know.” The mop of hair would grumble and burrow itself deeper into the sheets. Baekhyun would stumble his way back towards the bed, pull apart the heap until a dimple emerges.

“I don’t know which shampoo to use. Show me?” 

“You know there’s only one shampoo bottle in there.”

Baekhyun would pull on a bare arm. “Come on. We’ll save on time and water anyway.”

They would both be fifteen minutes late.

 

*

 

A short interlude:

“This. This is terrible. Absolutely,” Baekhyun lied, voice stuttering, feeling every shake of his thighs and legs. “I’ll be thinking all about your dick in the next mission, accidentally _singing about it_ , oh god, and the warships would have the impression I’m a massive pervert who can’t function without sex.”

“That’s. That’s fine. I can get used to—“ A huff of breath. “—my body parts being objectified,” Yixing laughed, sounding strangled, muffling it by kissing Baekhyun deep with tongue and teeth. Then he hid his face in the crook of Baekhyun’s sweaty neck, flushed and smiling. It was reassuring that Baekhyun could still make him laugh even in this. Yixing twisted his hips just so, and _shit_ , there were sparks behind Baekhyun’s eyelids. He held onto Yixing’s arms. He held on and Yixing was there, as solid as having his own Earth beneath his feet. 

 

*

 

“Joonmyun.” Yixing raised his hand. “If I may discuss something else in this meeting?”

Baekhyun looked up from his ham and cheese sandwich (no sign of a cucumber’s green ass anywhere). There had been zero attempts to poison him for almost a full week now. Probably because he’d been spending less and less time in his own quarters and Kyungsoo’s toiletries had been more or less safe from Baekhyun’s clutches.

“Yes, of course.” Joonmyun turned a questioning glance at Minseok. Minseok only shrugged back at him. It was a mission debriefing for Jongdae’s latest outing with Yixing and Sehun, and it was as standard as they come these days (musical handshake, warship AI falls in love with Jongdae’s cheekbone-powered high notes, profit).

Yixing stood up and cleared his throat. “About the subject of Byun Baekhyun’s and mine’s personal affairs.”

“Oh god.” There went his ham and cheese sandwich on the floor. Lee Soo Man’s projection shouldn’t mind right? If this was a sign of things to come for the rest of his week this would only be one of many casualties.

“This is also a kind of debriefing.” Yixing glared at Baekhyun. “And we agreed we were going to tell them.”

“Why does this sound so familiar?” Chanyeol chewed through his kimbap. Baekhyun didn’t throw bread at his face but it was a near thing.

“I thought we were just going to email them! Or, like, telepathically communicate it to our close friends!”

“I heard declaring the purity of your love through a musical number is a hot trend these days.” Kyungsoo said behind his own roll of kimbap.

“Hmm.” Yixing frowned. 

This time Baekhyun let himself chuck a bread slice in Kyungsoo’s direction. “Stop it.”

Joonmyun cleared his throat, his face going a little crumply. “Go on ahead, Yixing.”

“Yes, as I was saying, Baekhyun and I have been having intimate relations—“

“Oh god.” Baekhyun wanted to shrivel up and die.

“—which may otherwise affect certain aspects of our day-to-day life on this ship.“

“I don’t want to laugh.“ Jongdae did laugh because he was a terrible terrible person under all that sunshine. “But this is just so great.”

Yixing soldiered on, for a lack of a better word, despite people’s tendency to be overcome with a case of muffled giggles. "But rest assured we will continue to be completely professional in performing our respective duties to this ship and to the state. That’s all.” And as if belatedly realizing he needed input from the other half of this ‘outing’ he turned to Baekhyun. “Did I miss anything?”

The space underneath the tables was not enough to hide in. “Nope. None.”

“Thank you for, uh, telling us, Yixing.” Joonmyun refused to look over his shoulder and Minseok didn’t look willing to look as well. Who knew what holographic old men thought these days?

Sehun raised his hand. “I have a question.”

“Yes, please, Sehun.” Joonmyun said.

Sehun, the devil incarnate, grinned. “So, who tops? “

Yixing nodded. “We don’t talk about it but we switch—“

Baekhyun threw his tablet at the holographic device and knocked it off the table. Lee Soo Man winked out before Baekhyun could think too much about it.

“We, um.” Chanyeol glanced at the wreckage on the floor. “We sort of forgot it was there, actually.”

Baekhyun glared. “I thought so, you horrible bunch of people.”

Joonmyun slumped into his seat. “ _Thank you_. That was probably for the best. We won’t even take it out of your pay.”

 

Fin.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [exo rare pairs fic exchange](http://rarepairexo.livejournal.com/) using the prompt: thighs, butts, and space cowboys. My recipient didn't quite make it to the end but I still hope they see this. Cleaned up a bit from the original post. Again, thanks to K who asked the relevant q's, like why can't I just finish this story, etc.


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